The Problem

Greece's banking system has a complicated recent history. Years of financial instability, capital controls, and institutional failures left many Greek consumers deeply wary of banks — and particularly wary of anything new. Into this environment, Praxia arrived with an ambitious proposition: launch the country's first fully app-based bank, replacing printed forms, branch visits, and bureaucratic friction with a seamless, mobile-first experience.

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The brief was not simply to design a good banking app. It was to design one that people would actually trust — in a market where that trust had been badly damaged, and where the nearest reference points for digital banking (Revolut, N26, Monzo) were foreign products built for very different contexts.

My Role

I led the end-to-end design engagement as Product Design Lead and CX Lead, with Praxia as a client of the agency. My responsibilities spanned the full scope of the project: UX strategy, user research, design direction, prototyping, and stakeholder management. I collaborated closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and suppliers, as well as Praxia's own leadership team, and oversaw the work through to handover to Praxia's internal team for development and launch.

The Core Challenge

This project had three distinct and simultaneous hard problems, each of which could have derailed the work independently.

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Trust. Designing for a market shaped by financial crisis meant that every interaction — onboarding, account management, transfers, savings — had to actively build confidence rather than assume it. Tone, transparency, and the feeling of security were as important as usability. Users weren't just unfamiliar with app-based banking; some were actively resistant to it.

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Regulatory complexity. The Greek financial regulatory environment — Bank of Greece requirements, PSD2, AML compliance — is both demanding and, in places, genuinely at odds with the frictionless experience challenger banks are known for. Navigating what could be simplified, what had to be preserved, and how to present regulatory requirements in a way that felt like protection rather than bureaucracy was a constant design challenge throughout the project.

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Stakeholder alignment. Praxia was a startup with strong founder opinions and a leadership team whose vision for the product was still crystallising as the design work was underway. Aligning stakeholders on a coherent product direction — while maintaining momentum and managing expectations about what was achievable within the constraints — required sustained facilitation and clear, confident creative leadership throughout.

Key Decisions

Designing trust as a visual and tonal system, not a feature. Rather than treating trust as something addressed by a single onboarding screen or a security badge, we embedded it throughout the entire experience. Tone of voice, data transparency, clear explanations of regulatory steps, and a visual language that felt grounded and credible rather than flashy — all of these were deliberate decisions made in service of a user base that needed to feel safe before they would engage.

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Using regulatory requirements as a differentiator. Where competitors minimised or obscured compliance steps, we took a different approach: making Praxia's regulatory rigour visible as a feature rather than an obstacle. In a market where financial institutions had lost credibility by appearing to bend rules, a bank that was openly, clearly compliant had a genuine positioning advantage. We designed the compliance moments in the journey to feel like reassurance rather than friction.

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Running alignment workshops before design reviews. Given the complexity of stakeholder dynamics, we front-loaded the engagement with structured workshops to establish shared product principles before presenting any design work. This meant that by the time concepts were on screen, the criteria for evaluating them had already been agreed — dramatically reducing the scope for subjective disagreement and keeping decision-making focused on outcomes rather than preferences.